Blood On Borrowed Wings: A Dark Fantasy Thriller

by Darren Stapleton

  She walked around the counter and immediately stood beside the waitress who had been dragged over it. Her collar was ripped and she had three very pink, visible nail welts embossed on her neck.

  Beefy pulled a machete from his waistband.

  ‘No one is going to get hurt if you do as we say.’

  A groan came from the man slumped behind the counter.

  Twitcher kicked him in the ribs.

  ‘Shut up!’ he snapped.

  There was a whelp then the groaning continued but at a lower key.

  ‘You.’ Beefy pointed his machete like a long finger at the waitress. ‘Till.’

  The waitress ducked her head, like it was raining heavily as she moved towards the opposite end of the counter where the till was.

  ‘Keep moving and hurry it along,’ said Beefy calmly, incongruously. He sounded like a narrator. Divorced from the action, he surveyed the room.

  Most of the people in the coffee shop looked slack jawed, glassy eyed, quiet, acquiescent and fearful for their lives. They exchanged nervous glances and tics and pawed at empty mugs of coffee.

  All except one.

  One man was staring back at him, expressionless. Beefy turned to address him, and used his machete as a pointer again.

  ‘Do we have a problem?’

  He kept staring.

  The waitress at the till stopped fiddling with the register’s key and looked at the defiant man in the corner booth.

  ‘Yes,’ he said almost imperceptibly.

  Beefy looked at his man by the door, who stood about eight feet from the man in the corner booth. Their man by the door was nearer to this interloper, and he nodded to Beefy before turning his crossbow to aim at the resistant customer.

  Beefy took two steps closer and raised a hand out behind him, to keep Twitcher in place.

  ‘There’s always one,’ said Beefy.

  ‘Always,’ sneered Twitcher. ‘Makes it more fun.’

  Nobody else spoke.

  There was an increase in the tension, every little noise seemed amplified in the quiet. Something boiled and hissed steam behind the door to the kitchen.

  The floored barista moaned.

  Someone swallowed noisily.

  Then the door was rattled on its deadbolt as someone from outside tested to see if the coffee shop was open.

  Using the distraction, the man in the booth was up and diving for the man by the door before people had even registered the source of the rattling. The Doorman fired his crossbow at the space the man in the corner booth had occupied, the bolt punched into the lacklustre upholstery and entirely disappeared into the foam inside. He was sent staggering backwards by the customer who piled into him, low and hard. There was a flash of silver and then blood arced into the coffee shop, hitting three customers’ lower trouser legs and shoes. The man from the booth stood to his feet.

  Doorman gurgled and clawed at the handle of the spoon now protruding from his neck.

  Somebody screamed.

  Colour filled Beefy’s face and one of his knuckles popped as he tightened his grip around his weapons handle.

  ‘You ready to meet you maker, eh?’ Twitcher shouted from behind Beefy, trying to get a clear shot at the man from the booth.

  ‘My maker?’ said the man from the booth. He absently dabbed at a couple of droplets of blood on one of his cuffs.

  ‘The odds of that are slim to none. Mother Vedett is dead. My father died too, eventually, and I do not believe in any distant god.’

  Twitcher adjusted his stance.

  The waitress at the till slowly began to lower herself behind the counter again.

  Vedett grinned. He loved this. His tone lowered, ‘And the chance of you meeting the cum dripping cunt that shat you out like the faecal stain you are, ever again, ended when you decided to walk through that door, spoil my drink and ask me if I have a fucking problem.’

  Beefy rushed him.

  Vedett grabbed a slender bin and swiped it sideways like a battering ram, beneath the machete’s blade and obliterated one of Beefy’s knees. He stumbled forward, his momentum pitching him towards his intended victim, his role now different, his outcome more certain. The machete fell from his hand and tumbled to rest near Vedett’s booth. Vedett stood and using his arms and Beefy’s motion, propelled him up and over his shoulder to crash down heavily onto his bleeding colleague by the door. Vedett turned, grabbed the machete and swung it viciously at Beefy. He had had three or four deep hacks at him before Twitchy accidentally discharged his crossbow, it embedded deep into the side of the head of Doorman, through the seemingly impervious part of the skull, an inch above his ear.

  Vedett turned and threw the machete instinctively low at Twitcher. Twitcher ducked and the machete caught him handle first in the sternum. He was winded and crumpled over the serving counter. Vedett quickly moved across the coffee shop, stepping on the indignant, floored woman as he went. Twitcher blinked trying to comprehend what was wrong and struggled to push a breath into shocked, temporarily empty lungs. Vedett vaulted the counter and grabbed two still steaming cups of coffee from the serving hatch next to the kitchen door. He dashed one into Twitcher’s face and Twitcher hit the floor at the side of the male barista, writhing and screaming at a pitch so high it was scarcely audible to the human ear.

  He took longer to pour the final cup onto Twitcher’s crotch.

  Always leave one to tell the tale, Vedett thought.

  The screaming filled the small coffee shop. Vedett absently noticed that there were sobs and cries from other people too, but did not care.

  Everyone was staring at him.

  They were more horrified than when Beefy had started to make his announcements.

  He revelled in it.

  Smiling, he walked to the waitress at the till, who was sobbing.

  She flinched away as he got closer, ‘Puh... puh... please...’ she said. He moved her to one side and twisted the key to open the cash register. He reached in, took a large handful of credits. ‘For my trouble,’ he said to the waitress. He then vaulted the counter, disengaged the deadbolt and used the door to shove and scrape the bodies out of his way.

  ‘Amateurs,’ he muttered, as he turned the sign on the door back to ‘Open’, raised the blinds and left. He was annoyed at the inconvenience of having to rearrange the meeting he had scheduled at the coffee shop, nothing more, so he slammed the door and went to call Coyle. He would have to meet him at the warehouse. The door had smeared a perfect arc of dark red across the white and black chequerboard floor as it shut.

  The middle aged woman flinched at the slam and reached up and waved her fingers in front of the eye that was now without its half of the spectacles.

  She was not sure what she had just seen.

  Nobody was.

  Shoot a man and they’ll give you a medal. Shoot a dog or a pussycat and you are in serious, deep, deep, shit.

  Modern Warfare and the Media:

  The Thin Black Headline Between Sympathy and Outrage

  W. Duchalle

  CHAPTER 21

  ‘Ten credits if you can hit him.’

  ‘Him or her.’

  ‘Him or her.’

  ‘Hit it? Make it twenty and I’ll catch it.’

  Croel patted the wad of credits in his jacket pocket. ‘Well, call me Mr. Affluent, but I am feeling particularly extravagant today.’

  ‘Alright Mr. Affluent, place your credits where your spouting mouth hole is.’ Mckeever rubbed absently at his eye patch, ‘or should that be Mr. Effluent?’

  ‘The only seepage I can see is the liquefied remnants of your eye escaping down your cheek.’

  Mckeever tried to ignore him but then wiped a sleeve across his cheek and jaw before quietly taking off his overcoat. ‘Game on,’ he said.

  They looked up at the thrush that was perched on the lip of a large, tattered hole in the roof. Mckeever’s black wings were flush to his back as he crept along the dimly lit perimeter of the room, slowly edging closer to
the morning’s natural daylight and the small brown bird silhouetted against it. He looked like a vulture in both gait and purpose.

  The library’s loft was a dank festering mess of mouldy books and rotting paper and carpet. The rain was allowed all too easy access by the various punctures and blow holes that punctuated the sharp angles of the roof, like tattered exit wounds in flesh. Fungus thrived on thick, woven book covers and sought to create new patterns on flayed wallpaper and the spongy floor. Even the birds’ whistled song could not penetrate the lofty murk to any meaningful extent; the lyrical, stuttered warbles chirped of vitality, vibrancy and colour but died in the cold, dank quagmire of decay.

  Songs had no place here.

  The morning light struggled down through a rafter free hole that four slates used to occupy and illuminated Croel’s paper-cut smirk. He clapped his hands mischievously and chuckled as the thrush sputtered into motion and took off. Mckeever snapped an annoyed glance at Croel before springing to the centre of the room where the soft, chewed floorboards that sat directly below the loft’s largest hole were bowed and buckled. They began to sigh, soggy, disconcerted moans at his weight. They were dissolving beneath his feet and seemingly about to transport him with great speed and purpose to the next floor down. Moments before the level turned into quicksand he sprang up, through the hole and out onto the roof, where he disturbed a few of the remaining slates before a strong downbeat of his wings took him away from the rotting library’s shell and into the sky. It was not graceful, but it was an amazing feat of physical dexterity given the confines and restrictive nature of his environment. Croel clapped again, this time without ill intent or irony and, still chuckling, dashed to the main stairwell to make his way to the roof via a concrete flight of stairs, altogether less precarious or entertaining. Outside he scanned the skyline and nearby buildings for signs of Mckeever.

  There.

  Perched in the high, acute angle of a nearby church window, the gothic, elegant lancet arch framed him where he sat, just below the keystone, rubbing his eye-patch and grimacing like a macabre gargoyle fashioned after a long dead pirate saint. The stained glass had fallen from the archaic window years ago, and was now fractured and scattered across the graveyard fifty feet below like fossilised and forgotten confetti. There had been no limitations on height in architecture or structure when the church had been built. It had once been a place used for public displays of fickle commitment, pointless worship and goggle-eyed grief. Now, as it towered above the dirge of low level structures and cowered derelict shells, it was a great lookout spot.

  Mckeever surveyed the surrounding area.

  His head angled and darted from side to side, birdlike and skittish, checking the angles, taking in details, searching for prey. His wings hulked at his back as he watched and waited. Unsatisfied with his progress he gracefully fell from the window, flew between the buttresses and then used his downward momentum to bank into a strong up-current and climb to the base of the transept spire, the church’s highest point, where he perched again.

  The weather vane pointed between N and E, as it had for decades.

  Mckeever looked in the opposite direction and found his quarry. The thrush was in a nearby tree, betraying its position with a song that no doubt boasted of a recent heroic escape.

  Mckeever locked onto it and fell silently, a black missile. His wings shaped as a compressed capital M, angled for speed, only pulling up at the final possible instant. He hit the top of the branches with a noisy clatter, his legs spread and his hands snatched down, plucking the bird from the tree, like a child snatching marbles from the playground in a comical bunny hop. He clutched the thrush to his chest as he spiralled to maintain control, coming out of the spin to fly to the library roof where Croel stood slowly applauding. It was the rhythmic, sarcastic clap that implied derision rather than any kind of admiration or acknowledgement.

  ‘Got her,’ Mckeever blustered, breathless from the effort.

  ‘Or him.’

  ‘Or him.’

  ‘It’s good to know you have retained some of your finer techniques though it was certainly more, ah, buzzard than hawk, shall we say.’

  ‘No, “we” shall not say. You shall say. You always do fucking say.’

  Croel harrumphed to cancel out Mckeever’s indignation.

  ‘It’s skewed my depth perception and it’s definitely going to take some getting used to in the air but I can still fly, still hunt. I think I’m going to be OK.’ He looked at the small brown bird in his hand and asked, ‘What do you think little thing, hmmm? Would you say I gave you a good run for his money?’

  Croel grumbled and rummaged in his pockets for an age to produce twenty credits, that he begrudgingly handed over, despite their substantial pay last night.

  ‘You know what they say: a bird in the hand is worth twenty smackers in your back pocket.’ He kissed the credits and stuffed them into his trousers.

  ‘No. You say. Not they. You.’

  There was a moment of silence between them that Mckeever took as a hostile invitation to continue gloating.

  He declined.

  Croel started to walk toward the stairs. ‘Let’s go down for some target practice. The crossbows are primed and I want to exercise my area of expertise now that you have had your fun.’

  Mckeever nodded and followed him to the stairwell.

  ‘And maybe you will be an honourable gentleman and allow me to win my money back.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mckeever, ‘but it’s got to be on the wing.’

  ‘That goes without saying, old friend.’

  ‘Hey, less of the friend.’

  They both laughed.

  ‘And Mac’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Bring her or him.’ Croel said, gesturing at the thrush, then bounded down the flight of stairs in two jumps.

  Mckeever looked into the unblinking, shiny black eyes of the bird and felt it trembling in his hand.

  It had been silent since its capture.

  ‘If we are lucky, Croel will miss and you will double my money as you fly free.’

  The thrush cocked its head as if trying to decode this alien, whistle free tongue.

  Mckeever pulled the fire exit door shut and started down the stairs fully aware that Croel would already have his crossbow ready and that the bird’s fate, his or her's, was already forged.

  His colleague, backed or otherwise, never missed.

  A problem shared is still a fucking problem.

  Vanguard Training

  Sergeant Windaker

  CHAPTER 22

  ‘Ghyll said they had been told to await further instruction,’ I said to Doc Carlow.

  ‘Meaning?’ Carlow asked.

  ‘That there’s something much bigger going on in the background.’

  ‘It implies something else to me, something less obvious but much more salient.’

  Pan shrugged her ignorance, looked into a wall mirror and carried on trying to tease her hair into some semblance of order. It was not working.

  ‘I don’t know, maybe that someone else was on their way to finish me off, that I should have hung around to see who came along,’ I said.

  ‘You’re missing the point,’ Doc sat back in one of his floral chairs with a slight air of smug satisfaction. His palms were pressed together, making a steeple of his fingers. ‘Try not to think about you and your course of action, think about them. Leave the hyperbole behind and look at what you know.’

  ‘They were low-life scum for hire and someone blackmailed them to come after me.’

  ‘Good, go on.’

  ‘They were holding us both there until…’

  ‘Until what exactly?’

  ‘Further instructions,’ added Pan, looking at my reflection in the mirror. She nodded, pleased she had been able to join in.

  ‘So why didn’t someone just pay them to finish you both off? Would it not have been infinitely less elaborate to have them just kill you there, at the Arena? Why tra
nsport you to the cells?’ Doc sat forward becoming animated. ‘The people who orchestrated this obviously have great power and resources. I mean, they managed to catch these, what did you call them, “scum-bags”, where the Mudhead Police had failed on a number of occasions, yet somehow they got to them and coerced them into catching you.’

  ‘I know they didn’t want to kill me. That was obvious. I knew that when I woke up in the cell. Like I said, there’s something bigger going on.’

  ‘You are still missing the point. What did they want if not to kill you?’

  ‘They wanted me out of the way.’

  ‘Now we are getting somewhere.’

  ‘But why? I was there on a job to catch the very people who dragged me off into the sunset.’

  ‘It’s a timing thing. They must have wanted you out of the way, right then, for a specific reason. Find out the ‘why’, find out what else went on last night and the ‘who’ will follow.’

  ‘I did not understand a word of what he just said,’ said Pan.

  ‘He just said I am being primed or framed for something and I need to work out who is doing it. Fast.’

  ‘I have something else to suggest, and I hope it does not offend your warrior code or selfish sensibilities.’

  I finished off my tea with two noisy gulps. I hadn’t realised it was cold and shuddered as it went down.

  ‘I think they wanted you to escape.’

  ‘It didn’t look or feel that way,’ said Pan, rubbing her chin.

  I shot her a sympathetic look and then thought about what Doc had just said and the ease of my escape.

  He had a point.

  ‘Whoever wanted you there, knows who you are and what you are capable of. They supplied you with all the ingredients you needed to get out: inept, careless captors, flimsy holding facilities, minimal guard presence with no supervision or back up, despite knowing your skills well and having you where they supposedly wanted you.’

  It was all starting to make sense.